The Storytellers Of Music

I listened to a Vivaldi piccolo concerto earlier today and the thought occured to me that what today's classical musicians play a piece might not be the same as how the first musician to play the piece played it. I'm not saying that we've lost what Bach and Mozart had in mind, I just think there's a possibility that we could have deviated a bit.

There isn't, the way I see it, one really solid way to pass down specific ways to play notes. The written music doesn't change, but with how subjective music can be played, I think the way the dots on the pages have been played has to have changed. There weren't any recordings devices in the eighteenth century, at least I don't think so. We could pass some things down through people, but nobody's lived quite that long.

I dunno. It's just an interesting though to think that, from the same sheet of music, two different concertos could have been played, one at its first showing in the Baroque period and another when said concerto was recorded in 1995.